minimalism

My room has always been a mess. Today, when I say “mess,” I mean I have a couple piles of books and some empty spaces on a shelf—or, I have a shelf completely filled and an overflow collected on my bedroom floor. There are stacks of papers on my bookshelf, on my nightstand, on my desk, on the printer on my desk… I know what they all say (or at least I did at one point). At the end of the semester, all of these papers will go into folders. They will occupy a bottom shelf or a box somewhere. They will look like accomplishments, be useful, provide some frame of reference—but, most of all, I tell myself they won’t be familiar. I’ve stopped myself from doodling in the margins. When I run my fingers over the sheets, I’ll feel nothing but paper. I won’t feel the sensitivity that ripples over the too thin skin of a scar.

The word “mess” meant something different in 2009. Then, a mess looked like clothes piled higher than my desk because every morning was a test to see what I was able to wear. Shirts that looked like days I didn’t want to remember, sweaters that smelled like nights I shouldn’t have gone out, pants that almost whispered words I don’t think I ever heard. In 2009, the tops of my dresser and vanity were covered with papers and cards that my eyes refused to read. Drawers were stuffed with pictures and poems scrawled in adolescent writing. Stuffed animals, dried flowers, mixtapes (which really meant CDs, because, well, it was 2009) were all shoved under my bed. I knew these things were there, but only when I thought about it—or only when I touched them.

In 2009, my father asked me why I never cleaned my room. I started to cry and said I was afraid. If I shut my bedroom door, nobody shamed me until I cleaned it.

If nothing else, my young adult life epitomizes the way I’ve spent my time tactfully avoiding games of Minesweeper. It’s not that I hate everything. The problem is, even the good memories are bombs hiding too close to those taunting red 3s. The problem is that every object creates another image of someone who looks like me. It’s this feeling of some uncanny double—it’s someone I can’t control, but at one point she had my body.

I’ve struggled with this idea my entire life. This strange feeling of oddly “supernatural” attraction or attention to certain objects. For so long, I’ve tried to understand why I am unnerved by good memories and the way they make me feel unsettled (let’s assume I can at least begin to understand the bad). Recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea of (what I’ve come to characterize and understand as) “resonance” made possible by media and forms. How can media create reverberations of people and moments that are no longer present?

Since coming to graduate school, and college more generally, I feel like I have encountered potential explanations for the feelings I’m attempting to describe here. Maybe this is some form of repression. Maybe it’s loss and grief for things, people, and time I recognize but cannot replace. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. I am deeply unsatisfied by almost all of these explanations.

The fear I described to my father as a young teenager feels closer to what I want to call “resonance” now, but it also references some form of dissonance. There’s some tangible struggle between a present moment trying to live alongside the past. While I want to support the idea that affective objects can produce similar feelings to what I am describing, this is still unsatisfying because it does not accurately describe “dissonance” as I am trying to understand it.

Dissonance is disembodiment. Recently, I’ve been reading about how discourses of spiritualism were used to talk about Victorian “new” media and technology. Using spiritualism to explain the unsettling feeling and presentness of disembodied energy can be read as a desire to explain the power and presence of something that is not there. It is some force driving or reproducing a moment that has no tangible existence. It is real only in that it references something invisible.

Dissonance is the somewhat supernatural feeling of uncanniness—the idea that someone has been “here” before “doing this,” and that someone might have been you. It is the way a photograph of a person confirms the absence of a body. It is the way marginalia proves another hand touched a page. Dissonance comes when I’m listening to a saved voicemail from father, when I hear the recording of his voice, now disembodied. In these moments, sound is the proof of absence, but it is also the proof of presence.

Today, I feel this less. I try to keep my apartment free of all things that are not related to graduate school. I call it minimalism to the point where I almost believe it. Last week my inability to use a computer resulted in my opening a conversation from months ago. I read the conversation like I could see the people talking. The author of the blue bubbles on the right hand side, I almost felt like I knew her.

Noelle Hedgcock is an MA student in English at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests focus on nineteenth-century British literature and culture.